The Meaning of Truth, by William James

CHAPTER II

THERE are two ways of knowing things, knowing them immediately or intuitively, and knowing them conceptually or
representatively. Altho such things as the white paper before our eyes can be known intuitively, most of the things we
know, the tigers now in India, for example, or the scholastic system of philosophy, are known only representatively or
symbolically.

Suppose, to fix our ideas, that we take first a case of conceptual knowledge; and let it be our knowledge of the
tigers in India, as we sit here. Exactly what do we MEAN by saying that we here know the tigers? What is the precise
fact that the cognition so confidently claimed is KNOWN-AS, to use Shadworth Hodgson’s inelegant but valuable form of
words?

Most men would answer that what we mean by knowing the tigers is having them, however absent in body, become in some
way present to our thought; or that our knowledge of them is known as presence of our thought to them. A great mystery
is usually made of this peculiar presence in absence; and the scholastic philosophy, which is only common sense grown
pedantic, would explain it as a peculiar kind of existence, called INTENTIONAL EXISTENCE of the tigers in our mind. At
the very least, people would say that what we mean by knowing the tigers is mentally POINTING towards them as we sit
here.

But now what do we mean by POINTING, in such a case as this? What is the pointing known-as, here?

To this question I shall have to give a very prosaic answer — one that traverses the prepossessions not only of
common sense and scholasticism, but also those of nearly all the epistemological writers whom I have ever read. The
answer, made brief, is this: The pointing of our thought to the tigers is known simply and solely as a procession of
mental associates and motor consequences that follow on the thought, and that would lead harmoniously, if followed out,
into some ideal or real context, or even into the immediate presence, of the tigers. It is known as our rejection of a
jaguar, if that beast were shown us as a tiger; as our assent to a genuine tiger if so shown. It is known as our
ability to utter all sorts of propositions which don’t contradict other propositions that are true of the real tigers.
It is even known, if we take the tigers very seriously, as actions of ours which may terminate in directly intuited
tigers, as they would if we took a voyage to India for the purpose of tiger-hunting and brought back a lot of skins of
the striped rascals which we had laid low. In all this there is no self-transcendency in our mental images TAKEN BY
THEMSELVES. They are one phenomenal fact; the tigers are another; and their pointing to the tigers is a perfectly
commonplace intra-experiential relation, IF YOU ONCE GRANT A CONNECTING WORLD TO BE THERE. In short, the ideas and the
tigers are in themselves as loose and separate, to use Hume’s language, as any two things can be; and pointing means
here an operation as external and adventitious as any that nature yields.16

I hope you may agree with me now that in representative knowledge there is no special inner mystery, but only an
outer chain of physical or mental intermediaries connecting thought and thing. TO KNOW AN OBJECT IS HERE TO LEAD TO IT
THROUGH A CONTEXT WHICH THE WORLD SUPPLIES. All this was most instructively set forth by our colleague D. S. Miller at
our meeting in New York last Christmas, and for re-confirming my sometime wavering opinion, I owe him this
acknowledgment. 17

Let us next pass on to the case of immediate or intuitive acquaintance with an object, and let the object be the
white paper before our eyes. The thought-stuff and the thing-stuff are here indistinguishably the same in nature, as we
saw a moment since, and there is no context of intermediaries or associates to stand between and separate the thought
and thing. There is no ‘presence in absence’ here, and no ‘pointing,’ but rather an allround embracing of the paper by
the thought; and it is clear that the knowing cannot now be explained exactly as it was when the tigers were its
object. Dotted all through our experience are states of immediate acquaintance just like this. Somewhere our belief
always does rest on ultimate data like the whiteness, smoothness, or squareness of this paper. Whether such qualities
be truly ultimate aspects of being, or only provisional suppositions of ours, held-to till we get better informed, is
quite immaterial for our present inquiry. So long as it is believed in, we see our object face to face. What now do we
mean by ‘knowing’ such a sort of object as this? For this is also the way in which we should know the tiger if our
conceptual idea of him were to terminate by having led us to his lair?

This address must not become too long, so I must give my answer in the fewest words. And let me first say this: So
far as the white paper or other ultimate datum of our experience is considered to enter also into some one else’s
experience, and we, in knowing it, are held to know it there as well as here; so far, again, as it is considered to be
a mere mask for hidden molecules that other now impossible experiences of our own might some day lay bare to view; so
far it is a case of tigers in India again — the things known being absent experiences, the knowing can only consist in
passing smoothly towards them through the intermediary context that the world supplies. But if our own private vision
of the paper be considered in abstraction from every other event, as if it constituted by itself the universe (and it
might perfectly well do so, for aught we can understand to the contrary), then the paper seen and the seeing of it are
only two names for one indivisible fact which, properly named, is THE DATUM, THE PHENOMENON, OR THE EXPERIENCE. The
paper is in the mind and the mind is around the paper, because paper and mind are only two names that are given later
to the one experience, when, taken in a larger world of which it forms a part, its connections are traced in different
directions. 18 In any case, however, it is the same stuff figures in all the
sets of lines.

TO KNOW IMMEDIATELY, THEN, OR INTUITIVELY, IS FOR MENTAL CONTENT AND OBJECT TO BE IDENTICAL. This is a very
different definition from that which we gave of representative knowledge; but neither definition involves those
mysterious notions of self-transcendency and presence in absence which are such essential parts of the ideas of
knowledge, both of philosophers and of common men. 19

15 Extracts from a presidential address before the American Psychological
Association, published in the Psychological Review, vol. ii, p. 105 (1895).

16 A stone in one field may ‘fit,’ we say, a hole in another field. But the
relation of ‘fitting,’ so long as no one carries the stone to the hole and drops it in, is only one name for the fact
that such an act MAY happen. Similarly with the knowing of the tigers here and now. It is only an anticipatory name for
a further associative and terminative process that MAY occur.

17 See Dr. Miller’s articles on Truth and Error, and on Content and
Function, in the Philosophical Review, July, 1893, and Nov., 1895.

18 What is meant by this is that ‘the experience’ can be referred to either
of two great associative systems, that of the experiencer’s mental history, or that of the experienced facts of the
world. Of both of these systems it forms part, and may be regarded, indeed, as one of their points of intersection. One
might let a vertical line stand for the mental history; but the same object, O, appears also in the mental history of
different persons, represented by the other vertical lines. It thus ceases to be the private property of one
experience, and becomes, so to speak, a shared or public thing. We can track its outer history in this way, and
represent it by the horizontal line. (It is also known representatively at other points of the vertical lines, or
intuitively there again, so that the line of its outer history would have to be looped and wandering, but I make it
straight for simplicity’s sake.)

19 The reader will observe that the text is written from the point of view
of NAIF realism or common sense, and avoids raising the idealistic controversy.